Topic: Decentrally mined currency has failed so far - page 8. (Read 11281 times)

1/ In many places, it isn't, thanks to government regulation.
2/ "Potentially illegal filesharing via a bittorrent site" is a somewhat smaller issue than "global money transfers".

Your solution to most things seems to be "change ip address". This is fantastically short-sighted. You also seem to be conflating or confusing the issues of anonymity and freedom of transaction.

If the rapid centralization of mining hardware that we're seeing continues, and control of mining effectively consolidates into the hands of a few, then it is not much of a stretch of the imagination to think that governments/banks/corporations will seek to compel the victors (the cex.io's of the next decade) to blacklist transactions that they consider fraudulent. Your identity may be secure behind TOR (I wouldn't bet on it, personally) but if your address is blacklisted then you're still screwed, and no amount of TOR exit node hopping is going to change that.

The centralization of pools is a problem until it is solved, apparently p2pool is not the solution, and this sort of hand-waving and saying "it'll be ok, we'll figure this out" strikes me as naive, and fundamentally unwise.

This.  Imagine if Satoshi went around ranting and writing essays instead of actually coding the protocol.

The OP purports to be tech savvy, and I'm not here to challenge that...but if he is, wouldn't his time and energy be better spent building stuff (or at least having a focused technical discussion with a specific goal), rather than whatever it is we seem to be doing here?

I have stopped reading after a while.
I just have one question:
If governments can regulate everything, why is https://thepiratebay.se/ still there?

the way computers connect together for mining pools is not the bitcoin protocol.. there is nothing wrong with  bitcoin... its not even the rules of POW either.. yet again you are not understanding the point im making,

bitcoinD.exe is the protocol. there is nothing wrong with bitcoin or POW. i say this because i have had many people ask me if bitcoin is broke due to the stuff you have been saying.

mining pool software is separate, there is already software available that allows people to automatically jump/switch to different pools, thus your static IP address is irrelevant as with just a couple lines of code anyone can tweak pool jumping software to jump to dynamic addresses that change daily or randomly. thus mining pools can change their own IP addresses freely if they chose to and people can still mine.

so i do not see a problem with trying to hide pool locations and i definitely dont see a problem with the bitcoin protocol. nothing has failed and everything can be "rescued"

in answering your other worries relating to taxation/regulation of mining
mining pools are just a small part of bitcoin and no matter what law comes about to attempt to control bitcoin, people can just change the software as mentioned above to flip between IP addresses to lessen the chances of being traced. and also people can use different types of pool software such as p2pool etc which offer different features.

all of which would mean that mining pool hosts themselves never really touch the reward and all funds go directly to the individual decentralized miners, thus government cant tax or regulate someone that never receives the funds.

the problem is not with any software, code or protocol. its with peoples choices.
already their are pools that instant payout to individual addresses, as oppose to hoarding the coins and then only pay out on day X per week. this is not POW mining fault. this is the user interface and custom software the mining pool host chooses to use.

it takes months to integrate new laws into different countries and only minutes/hours to get new software out there. i can (although already mentioning a couple scenarios) can think of atleast 10 ways to keep bitcoin out of jurisdiction of a country, but all of them have nothing to do with changing the main bitcoin or POW protocols, but to change PEOPLES minds about how they work on their own individual systems.

which i tried to explain earlier as being that there is nothing wrong with the underlying code, but people and the choices they make

One countries over regulation becomes another countries opportunity... eventually the heavy handed entities will realize that this is truly a global economy that can survive nicely with or without them... that's when they begin to backpedal (as NY is currently in the process of).
BTW, thank you Canada for listening and letting the technology take it's course before submitting knee jerk regs  ... they will reap the early rewards.
The OP does not recognize international free market competition.

I was drawn to Bitcoin as a Utopianish Positivist. The problem has always been and will always be how do we get there? Talk doesn't get it done. You also can't just expect people to make great changes quickly. There is no need to create a perfect Bitcoin as there will never be one anyway. Change will come one battle at a time. Zeitgeisters call it "Transitional Technology." I learned a long time ago in business that to be successful, don't change everything, only change about 10% at a time. That way you don't lose your customers along the way. Miners will also adapt a little at a time so they learn to survive. Mining pools may one day be radically different than today. There are many real world as well as theoretical solutions they can try.

Whether you are talking about Bitcoin adoption, mining, Side Chains, or any other technology, the key thing to remember is why we are doing this. Who is this technology for? Solutions will present themselves as more of our peers join us.

blackbird307, I am not concerned about the Bitcoin price. I mention in passing that I had made some correct expectations on the declines in price only to establish a bit of my credibility as to be able to foresee trends.

The applicable theme of this thread is to about whether Bitcoin can succeed very well, while simultaneously defeating our ideals about monetary freedom.

What is strange is that I think we all share similar ideals about freedom and the political issues facing us Libertarians and anarchists. But for some reason, I don't seem to resonate with those who have a very lackadaisical attitude about threats to those ideals pertaining to Bitcoin.

I think this is because most people are followers, not leaders. They are accustomed to being led to a solution, not beating the path to a solution. I have always been a leader (sorry if it is bragging, but I was a leader on sports teams, a leader in my software projects, etc). Also I think most people don't want to assume the worst outcome, because they would feel so helpless and depressed. So that realization would always be avoided by their subconscious mind.

I really hate when people don't want to get things done. That is why usually it is best if I don't talk (and that is why I shut down the AnonyMint identity and I will not push this discussion too long-- also because I was suffering from bad health condition and needed to waste less time talking and more time focused on my health and actual work).

I am here to share my ideas, to perhaps raise awareness, to see what I can learn from others, and then collect all that experience and move on away from "Those who can't build, talk".

---

Edit: I am headed out to gym, dinner, maybe a date. Please feel free to express yourselves. I wanted to test my logic against the best of input. So thus, thank you to everyone who commented. I really appreciate it. You all helped me refine my thought process and logic.

To which one of me do you refer?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDVQbhOg3V4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr.#Mental_illness

Half the people in here discussing how bitcoin will never work, flawed, etc. Same discussion that took place every year in the past 4 years, nothing different.

Other half of everyone in here thinks bitcoin is going to increase 10x again. Let's think about the reasons why this will not happen in the near future.
- No driving force behind the price
- That's a 40 billion dollar market cap, how realistic is it to go from 5 billion to 40 billion in a week? How much money do you think that would require?

What if it goes from $370 to $100? It's very possible, we've seen drops like that in the past. On a scale of one to ten, how fucked are you?

That's alright, keep believing. Traders will milk the market of "moon", they don't care about the price, just the gains.

God I hope I'm not arguing with John Nash.

Agreed! In fact, Zbigniew Brzezinski has said "Populist Awakening" is possibly derailing the move towards a new world order controlled by the technocrats and elite.

However, you would be very naive to think that the global elite didn't anticipate this and didn't already have a plan of action. Brzezinski has hinted at their plan (which is obvious to me). Key on this phrase, "it is easier to kill a million". Do you not see ISIS rising funded by the USA leveraging the idealism of religious fundamentalism (and the push back against feminism and state castration of the Western males)? Do you not see the Ukraine war instigated by the CIA leveraging the dreams of the Ukrainians to join the Western quality of life they see on TV and internet? Refer to the Denver airport murals for their plan. The elite always inform you of their plan, so they have the moral high ground, because you were warned and didn't take corrective action.

I have long ago realized that the elite planned to turn those 130 million glossy eyed developing youth into a war rage machine, and then after the wars, by 2032 they will use their exhaustion and idealism to achieve a "social harmony" with a new world order peace as depicted in the Denver murals.



Yes Bitcoin has market dominance yet no block chain anonymity. Yes this is a major hurdle that even Monero can't climb. In short, we are complacent and going to be fucked by our ("Bitcoin is good enough; it can be improved if need be; it is better than sex") myopia.


Oh I guess you are one of those younger glossy eyed idealists?

Note I am not a Mathusian and I actually agree with that premise. But there is a lot of hurt to come between now and there.


Yes I want action. Trying to argue my case on that.

Agreed.

When I wrote the thread title I was sleepy and got myself conflated over the issue of centralization of mining pools and anonymity of mining pools. When I awoke, I realized we could at least get the situation we have now with mining pools (somewhat centralized) and improve the anonymity of the mining pools to deal with the threat I am talking about.

Also there are still significant problems in the way ring-sigs are implemented in the current crop of Cryptonote coins. I am talking forking changes needed.

Also the issue of transaction speed is a major one, because Bitcoin is not unlinkable and untraceable, so if you can't do transactions faster than Bitcoin, you are going to have a difficult time moving the market away from Bitcoin (and the plan to use off chain Paypal, Coinbase, etc to make transactions fast). The powers-that-be are sitting in an enviable market position. Note I assume Bitcoin's protocol can't be improved to add ring-sigs. I think there is too much vested inertia that would prevent that.

I agree with:

• There is much demand for anonymous networks, thus many have an incentive to create and improve them.
• Government can not beat the hackers in ingenuity.

Our weakness is our own myopia and hubris ("Bitcoin is better than sex") ignoring our weak points and just expecting "someone" will always provide a solution and not too late.

Worse myopia is franky1 not willing to admit Bitcoin's block chain can't be untraceable and unlinkable in the current version of the protocol.

BTC is an experiment - whether a token can have value without being backed by anything and it has been a success. As such I dont think it has failed.

If what it says in the first post is true it merely means that there are some flaws which can be corrected.

Someone wrote me in a PM that Bitcoin was too amateurish at launch to be a product of the NSA working group (or other taskforce created by some powerful who want to drive control over electronic currency the government). I replied as follows:

The NSA would of course be astute enough to give the presentation the necessary amateurish character.

And I emphatically agree the NSA was not involved in Cryptonote. Why would they? The necessary egg has already hatched.

Bitcoin is perfectly matched to co-opting the transition to electronic currency. The whitepaper was perfectly written to turn the gold bugs into drooling fanboys.

I use "NSA" as a catch all term for anything developed covertly. I agree more likely some working group funded directly by some umbrella of the globalists, than the NSA precisely (as you say there is a professional, structured culture there that wouldn't be a good fit to Bazaar-style open source entrepreneurial effort).

If some technical idiots banksters wanted to fund something like that, they would not have some structured process on code quality.

Nick Szabo wrote what Bitcoin became before it did. It is possible that someone put 2 + 2 together.

I agree with you that the possibility that the powers-that-be are just opportunists and at best might have just been expecting electronic currency to come and been trying to figure out how to get there, and were handed a black swan gift from a small group they did not create.


This is a typical, idealistic, drooling Bitcoin fanboy myopia ("there are too many of us, they can't track us all"). I mean I don't say it that way to ridicule you. Not at all. I am just saying this is blinded to the point I made.

Try reading what I wrote about regulating mining pools and how that is not akin to "whackamole". They only need to track the mining pools. From there, they can require any transaction that doesn't have identification attached to it (i.e. isn't originated from Coinbase, Paypal, Bitpay, Facebook, or any other Peter Thiel corporation, do you see the plan ) to be blacklisted by the mining pools.

When I said 18 months ago that Tor wasn't anonymous, everyone ignored me. Now we see I was correct and 100s of hidden services have been seized and research says 81% of Tor users can be unmasked.

And now when I say what will happen to regulation of mining and even cite that the trend is underway, you all still ignoring me.

Ignorance is bliss. How did you enjoy ignoring my warnings that Bitcoin would drop to $350? Are you going to hold for $200?

You don't need to be fully anonymous, just anonymous enough so that your privacy is protected from majority of others. If someone spend lots of time and resource to social engineering, you would be found eventually, but doing so is very time consuming and costly. Unless you have become the enemy of the state, there is just not enough human resource to social engineer everyone

Yes there are other ways to obtain an IP that is untraceable to your identity such as an unregistered prepaid USB dongle, connecting through an unregistered WiFi connection, even using a botnet to get throw away IP addresses.

But mining pools need to be at a stable IP address so none of those options above apply.

Also you did not address the point I made about Bitcoin's protocol can't provide untraceability and unlinkability.

The relevant analogy is you are the Philosopher's stone who can make gold with alchemy. Although it might be possible, it isn't practical nor realizable.

I do agree with the underlying point of your thesis, which is that the more the government pushes, the more we will push back.  So they would be wise not to regulate mining too soon. Wait and do it when they are really ready to take control so we don't have enough time to push back. Given your "don't worry" Philosopher's stone attitude, if they are wise and don't alert us, then we won't be able to implement fast enough once they go into rapid fire action around say 2017 or so.